Books by Rajani Sudan

The Alchemy of Empire unravels the non-European origins of Enlightenment science. Focusing on the abject materials of empire-building, this study traces the genealogies of substances like mud, mortar, ice, and paper, and forms of knowledge like inoculation, arguing that East India Company employees deployed the paradigm of alchemy in order to make sense of the new worlds they confronted.

"An original and elegant work that will make signal contributions to the fields of eighteenth-century studies and Romanticism, and to the study of British nationalism and colonialism."-Adela Pinch, University of Michigan